I hate to get on Bill Nye, and I agree with the need for more foreign aid even. I must protest non the less about war being a minor factor in poverty and related deaths. Blaming the millions that die of starvation and malnutrition in Africa on that alone is little different than saying that the millions who starved under Stalin and Mao could have been saved by foreign aid.

Even when there isn't active warfare in the most poverty ridden places of the world, there are warlords and criminals ruling the region through starvation and actively redirecting what little foreign aid there is to themselves and away from those that do not support them. Simply sending more food and money to places like Somalia or North Korea does nothing to help the people there, and if the aid is naively sent blind to whomever holds power it actually makes things WORSE by strengthening the very monsters responsible for the suffering. I'd like to believe our apathy here is the biggest problem as much as the next guy, but the reality is that there are also people local to the problem involved first hand in perpetuating and profiting from human suffering. If we refuse to admit that there are instances were 'aid' necessarily takes the form of shooting the bad guys then we are doomed to watching as the next genocide plays out, as we did for the Rwandan Tutsis, Iraqi Kurds and Shias and countless others.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, January 21st, 2014 4:05am PST - promote requested by eric3579.

I agree with a lot of what you say. I kind of felt that he wasn't necessarily suggesting a solution, but more saying that it isn't a futile problem. I would love to have seen our country go into Rwanda or Darfur and stop what was going on and I think it could have been done easily. I don't think that is our agenda unfortunately or the agenda of the people in power at least. The American people probably would have been proud of stopping another genocide. I read a book about one of the survivors (lost boys) and it was sickening what he lived through.

And I fully agree and support people getting across the point that aid to places like Africa is not futile. I just fear the big overlap of people that insist that military intervention is therefor always a detriment and the dollars far better spent on aid. I wish I shared your optimism on popular opinion if intervention had taken place in Rwanda, but I just don't see it. The other two genocides I mentioned were committed by Saddam and we've all seen how popular that reception was around the world. The Belgian officer in charge in Rwanda was facing a court martial for putting his men in harms way as the genocide began. I'm afraid I have zero doubt had Clinton sent Americans to stop the Rwandan genocide our popular opinion today would be the lesson of how tragic the foreign intervention was in escalating a civil war into a disaster and if only Clinton had listened to the voices begging for peace not war.

the impending disaster is overpopulation and it's byproducts - CO2 emissions, waste, and resource depletion.

Infant mortality efforts need to be a package deal with contraceptive efforts.

@bcglorf @Fairbs

I used to hold the same view on military intervention. If only it were applied impartially by a nation or alliance, then any would be genocidal leader would be deterred by threat of imprisonment or death.

However we all know that in reality this is stymied by the lack of altruistic intentions, the political dimensions of risking soldiers' lives in foreign wars and the unintended consequences of even fully altruistic intervention.

I can't really argue against there being a case for intervention in Rwanda or after Saddam gassed the Kurds.

A sufficiently large force by the US/NATO would have probably deterred the Hutu militias in Rwanda from waging their genocide. Had the international community demanded Kurdish sovereignty from Iraq following the gas attacks, Saddam would have probably accepted it coming off the Iran-Iraq war for fear of being attacked by Iran while he waged a civil war.

In either case I can also play devil's advocate. Would the inevitable Tutsi government set up by intervening forces in Rwanda have been seen as legitimate by its people? Would reconciliation really have been effective if it was effectively imposed by outside powers? Would civil war have reignited? Even with how things turned out in the absence, we know that Kagame's government is increasingly authoritarian and has supported militias like M23 in Congo against the remnants of Hutu militias which has itself been a source of much death and violence. In the case of the Kurds, what if calls for cession resonated in the Kurdish population in Syria and Iran and the opposition turned violent in those countries?

In most cases, while hypothetical intervention may appear the clear moral ground I just can't be certain the outcome would have been better. In the case of Rwanda, probably, a large portion of the 500,000 lives lost would have been spared. In the case of the Iraqi Kurds, no intervention would have pre-empted the initial gas attack, however inciting the situation could have resulted in more people dying in violent struggle and resistance.

@RedSky,

I really hear what you are saying. When faced with Rwanda though, I just can not agree that the world response of doing nothing, even to the point of refusing to use the term genocide, was 'better' than an intervention, even a unilateral one. I know it's maybe not a strong logical, factual argument, but standing aside while a genocide takes place is to me morally wrong and unacceptable.

I also don't see any strong argument that an intervention would have made things 'worse' in the long run. The forces that committed the genocide were never actually stopped or apprehended. They just moved out of Rwanda and into the jungles of the Congo, where it's worth noting they continued to commit horrendous atrocities, all the way up until today, and no doubt tomorrow and years from now.

I think these so-called unstoppable warlords that siphon off our aid is an even bigger myth. The United States of America defeated the British Empire, invaded Nazi Europe, dropped a nuclear fucking bomb on Axis Japan, sacrificed thousands of lives in Vietnam, stood head to head against the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis, landed on the moon, funded Nicaraguan revolutionaries using money from arms sales to Iran, assassinated Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, lied about weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq, fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet we can't deal with warlords and civil wars in Africa where (at least with Rwandan civil war) weaponry is in the form of crate after crate of machetes made in China?

If all of those things are possible for the biggest super power in the world, how is it not possible to stop these warlords from siphoning our aid?

Lies.

We don't care so nothing of real consequence happens. All of those above events have one thing in common: our own goddamn self interest.

Everything sucks. May god have mercy on everyone's soul.

The problem isn't that there are warlords. The problem is that they are replaceable. Kill one, ten more weeds pop up. In fact, with the size of the world and population, all that you are asking is getting rid of weeds, say, in the State of Florida. Not a big task in a small garden, but... (I am speaking of the replacement rate, which is much higher than the current number of war lords and their lackeys.)

I don't think anyone is calling them unstoppable. There is just, as you point out, an unwillingness to do so. Internally to each warlord's zone, there is the inability to do so. Across the African Union, well, the majority dislike the precedent of unseating dictators for war crimes, so they are unwilling to help. The rest of the world is sitting far away, and comfortable. Our war hawks out here refuse to go in because there is nothing in it for them. Our peacniks refuse to go in because war is bad, end of conversation.

The sad truth is there are very few people in the world who both care about the plight of such people AND are willing to endorse intervention.

Look no further than Somalia. The world powers decide to use military escorts to distribute aid to the country fairly. A few US marines get killed, and immediately EVERY world power pulls out and leaves things alone. To this day standard warlord manuals clearly state that in the case of UN peacekeepers or foreign intervention, shoot 2-3 of them and wait a week for them all to go home.

While on one hand, I've always known that foreign aid is barely a drop in the bucket of our budget, but on the other, I'd still be hesitant to increase foreign aid to be completely honest.

so much shit that needs fixing and investment here domestically.

If we really could make a decent dent in military spending...then I'd be more comfortable with more foreign aid.

hate to say it but don't these people need to overthrow their own dictators and overlords? I'm ok with giving them some aid and giving them intel and other kinds of non-hardware military support. but they do need to fight their own damned battles.

I wonder if Bill has read Dambisa Moyo's book Dead Aid in which she argues for an end to destructive foreign aid to Africa, so African economies can solve their own problems. I can guess how Ms Moyo would respond to watching this video.

@VoodooV

I don't think you mean to be as callus as your statement seems. The world did follow your advice with Rwanda and let 'them' fight their own battles. It never actually settled anything, instead the main participants in the genocide just moved over to the jungles of the Congo. It's not coincidental that hundreds have been raped every day there ever since. Before advocating we not get involved watch the PBS documentary Ghosts of Rwanda, it's on the sift. It's as brutal as Schindler's List, but that it consists entirely of actual footage taken during the genocide. IMHO it should be required viewing in all public education systems.

I like Bill Nye. But this whole argument treats 'Africa' (as only one example of a region of the underdeveloped and exploited world) as the nebulous hell-region where bad things happen. He cites examples of these bad things, but then, in a characteristically bourgeois fashion, he focuses on the consumptive problems (not enough aid, not enough to eat, no enough medicine, etc). And who is responsible for this? The first-world, capitalist zones of power (the US, Europe, 'civilization', etc).

Why don't we actually look at the production-side of things. Why can't Africa produce its own resources? It once was able to, very efficiently and without problems. That is, until imperialism happened. We are taking about a continent that was broken up into artificial nations, where agriculture was transformed into cash crops, where millions were shipped off as slave labor. We are talking about a continent that has tried for hundreds of years to fight for liberation for itself, only to have these imperialist countries keep their stranglehold on its neck.

(go wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%ADlcar_Cabral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara

My point here is that the whole discussion of more or less foreign aid presupposes an Africa that cannot feed itself. The solution is not to continue a dependent relationship. The solution is a sustainable and liberated Africa, who has economic control over her resources, and political freedom for her own people. the solution is self-determination, not should the US try to feed more of the kids? (whose starvation is rooted in the US's wealth. )

/end rant

But, Africa isn't able to feed itself. Regional instability being an overwhelming part of that. When farmer and family spend a year growing a crop and raising animals for food, only to have men with guns come and take it at the end of the year, your production next year goes down. It doesn't take more than a single generation to go from prosperous ag to mass starvation, and for a multitude of reasons Africa has been facing that problem for multiple generations.

If we can agree the reasons for it are many fold and complicated, can I get agreement that there DO exist circumstances where foreign intervention absolutely is in the interest of the local people? It seems undeniable if you look at Rwanda that all of Central Africa would've been better served by action than the inaction our world collectively provided.

i'm not sure, but i'd start with texas.

Rwanda, CAR, all of these places that see poverty, murder, etc are all the consequence of foreign intervention. The regional instability is a direct result of American and European intervention for the past three hundred years or so.

There are many reasons. It is complicated. But that doesn't mean that its just a mess we can't understand.

Sending resources doesn't mean anything when the people themselves either don't receive it, or it doesn't actually empower anybody. What Africa needs is revolution and real economic independence. Not hypocritical philanthropy.